GLASGOW today elected the city's first trans woman councillor.

But Elaine Gallagher wants to be known for her skills, expertise and fighting for her constituency rather than her gender.

Elaine joins the wave of Green councillors elected across the city and plans to use her new role to tackle refuse issues in the Southside Central ward.

She said that was one of the main topics on the doorsteps - and she has a Masters degree in waste management.

Elaine said: "During the campaign I met with Living Rent and they wanted early on to speak to me about their plans for cleansing.

"They have three plans: their first is to improve the cleansing infrastructure and help re-fund the back court teams. 

"The second demand is to make sure that cleansing information and instructions are in different languages such as Urdu, Punjabi and Polish.

"And they want to do something about the fly tipping.

"I have a Masters degree in waste management as well as being trans. 

"I would prefer for people to actually see me as a candidate and a councillor now who is a waste manager and an environmental manager."

Elaine said she wants to work with "the council, the cleansing teams, community groups, locals and the national regulator" to go after the fly tippers.

She added: "There are things like slum landlords who don't pay to dump, they just put rubbish out on the street and that's an offence.

"And I want to make a distinction between the victims and the offenders and go after the offenders with the national regulator and the police."

Of her win, Elaine said she was shocked but, although she lives in the West End, is pleased to be representing Govanhill, a place she has worked for some time. 

She said: "It's incredible. I'm still coming to terms with it.

"I went down into the room more than half expecting not to be elected and I come out and I'm actually a councillor - I'm one of the new Greens councillors.

"The number of councillors we have, now five on the Southside, we can all work together to make change on the Southside.

"I've been working in Govanhill for a couple of years now with charities like the Feminist Economic Network and it's a great place.

"And it's incredible the diversity, the multicultural aspects of it.

"Some of those things from the point of view of the Green Party and from the council, they need a lot of work."

Elaine wants to tackle communication barriers in the area, having seen the lack of diversity in election materials during the campaign.

She said: "One of the things that I thought was brilliant was that it didn't matter the parties, all of the women who were activists outside the polling station were getting together to explain in Urdu to the people coming up that this was how you fill in the [ballot paper].

"And that's the community spirit [of Govanhill] that I think is wonderful.

"This is the Asian community, which I'm not a part of, but what I'm looking forward to is getting in contact with them and asking what they need, what they want, and do my best to provide it for them.

"And it doesn't matter what the nationality is, the ethnic community, all of those things, we need to improve the rights of all of the people who live in Govanhill and the Gorbals, which is my patch.

"And the Southside is increasingly the Greens patch."
Elaine's election means that Mhairi Hunter, who has represented the SNP in the area for 10 years, loses her seat.

She said local people were fed up of parties campaigning on national issues during a council election campaign.

And that they are sick of talk of independence and Brexit.

She added: "I don't want to start my term in office by criticising anybody but I know that what I saw was lots of love for Soryia Siddique and she's seen as one of the people who there's, she's out on the streets working and I think the view in the Southside, in Govanhill, was that Mhairi wasn't really seen out.

"So while she was very active in the SNP and active on Twitter you didn't really see her actually do things for the people in the tenements who need help with exploitative landlords.

"I think that's what people were voting for, they were voting for quality of life and not independence.

"They were voting for people who said, 'I see the rubbish in the streets and I'm gonna do something about it' rather than voting to kick the Tories out and get independence.

"So it's local politics. I think a lot of people were tired of Brexit, they were tired of the independence message.

"I am pro-independence but that's a national issue.

"Every party, Labour, SNP, Tories, were talking about national issues. Greens went around knocking on the doors and said, 'Hi, what do you need?'

"In Southside Central we learned that that was waste issues and rather than saying that this was the SNP's fault and Labour's fault, we said, 'Let's get this cleared up and here's how we're going to do it.'"